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EMIS: Environmental Management Information System
EIA and ISO 14001, OHSAS 18001
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ISO 14001 was first published in 1996 and specifies the requirements for
an environmental management system.
ISO 14001 is the corner stone standard of the ISO 14000 series.
It is not only the most well known, but is the only ISO 14000 standard
against which it is currently possible to be certified by an external
certification authority. However, ISO 14001 does not itself state specific
environmental performance criteria.
The structurally similar OHSAS 18001 addresses the closely related topic
of occupational health and safety.
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This standard is applicable to any organization that wishes to:
- Implement, maintain and improve an environmental management system
- Assure itself of its conformance with its own stated environmental policy
- Demonstrate this conformance
- Ensure compliance with environmental laws and regulations
- Seek certification of its environmental management system by an external third
party organization
- Make a self-determination of conformance.
This component provides a range of scenarios for checklists based evaluation systems
for both screening-level EIA for new plants or enterprises, individual emissions sources,
changes in production technology or substances stored or used, waste streams etc.
as well as ISO 14001 compliant pre-audit checklists for the evaluation. Monitoring, and adaptation of an EMS.
For the ISO 14001 and related evaluation schemes based checklists,
a hierarchy of issues and steps in the valuation procedure is offered.
This starts with five main levels:
- Environmental policy
- Planning and preparation
- Implementation and operations
- Monitoring, corrective actions
- Management review
Within each class of procedural steps, a summary evaluation uses a color
coding to denote the current state of the EMS implementation or review process:
- Completed
| - In preparation
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- In progress
| - Not yet
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- Just started
| - Not applicable
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At the individual problem level a rule-based expert system is used
to assist in the evaluation of the implementation procedure that
can be summarized at the project level (both the entire industrial park
as well as any one of the component plants or companies).
Evaluation of the implementation process or a screening level environmental impact assessment
can be embedded in the real-time expert system to alert the operator whenever
a time table defined is not being followed, or information used is out of date
to facilitate a swift implementation procedure and reliable results with continuous
background automatic quality control/quality assurance procedures based on
artificial intelligence (AI) expert systems technology.
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